An Unexpected Cost of Using Free Drug Samples
Reader Comments
Excellent
Very interesting article
What Are Your Thoughts
Very Recently, there has been a good deal of investigation by the
US Federal trade comission against bloggers and website developers
for not stating their advertising income, or existing
connections with ad networks.
What are your ideas about how this could potentially effect
the blog community?
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Samples
I use an expensive med that has no generic (you bet I asked, too!). Thank god the doctor was sympathetic and gave me samples.
Free drug samples
Even if you do have insurance, in most cases, the insurance company will only pay for the generic form. If the patient wants the brand name, he or she pays a lot more. It's a racket and the drug and insurance companies are the beneficiaries.
Generics
We have this debate in Canada. But - generics are NOT always exactly the same. For instance, Health Canada allows up to a 20% differential in the active ingredients between brand name and generics. The excipient ingredients, the fillers and bonding agents, can also differ significantly. This practise is common in other countries that permit generic medications.
Not a big deal with most meds. But a HUGE deal if you have stabilized a patient on one med, and then they start on a generic. If they develop problems, or experience side-effects on generics they often drop the med entirely, without knowing that they are on something that is not exactly what they thought. That becomes a significant cost in human terms.
And the alternative is...
what?
Once in the Part D "donut-hole" what other choice is there?
People say to me, contact the pharma's and get assistance, but I my Catch-22 is that my disability income is just outside of the 200% or less of the Federal Poverty Guideline.
